György Lukács, (born April 13, 1885, Budapest, Hungary—died June 4, 1971, Budapest), Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who influenced the mainstream of European communist thought during the first half of the 20th century. His major contributions include the formulation of a Marxist system of aesthetics that opposed political control of artists and defended humanism and an elaboration of the theory of alienation within industrial society originally developed by Karl Marx (1818–83).